Letters, we get letters
In response to this post about the service Lovejoy, which provides quasi-facsimiles of historical letters as a monthly subscription, I got this nice email from its proprietor, Michael Sitver:
Lee,I read your article on Letterjoy. I want to clarify a few things:1. Most of our plans are way less than $17/mo. Most are $13-14/mo.2. Many of our letters either aren’t available online or are hard to find online. We work hard to find unique letters from all around the country. For example, I spent 4 hours the other day in the National Postal Museum searching through their archives for a story (and letters) that would meet our criteria. Only 7% of their archives is available online.3. Our goal isn’t just to send you mail. Our goal is to recreate the experience of receiving important letters, and to provide context, so you experience not only the content of the letter, but the context in which it was received. We restore handwriting and letterhead to a format that’s authentic, but readable.Regardless, thanks for writing about Letterjoy.
Fair enough. I remain doubtful that there’s a large enough audience for this to be sustainable, but I respect Mr. Sitver’s entrepreneurial effort to find out. Even more, I appreciate his equable tone. That’s something generally more associated with letters from an earlier era than the social-media responses of today — and thus represents something lost when we moved into the digital age: manners. I wish Mr. Sitver luck with this enterprise, and his next one.